The Light of the World

by bugblaster

I started this series on light here at Still Reforming on January 18, but never finished it. In typically lazy fashion I've since reposted the first five of seven at my own blog to avoid writing something new, but finally worked up the wherewithal to do number six. There is no telling when seven may be delivered, but here is six, simulcast on Chez Kneel and Still Reforming.

This is part 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 on the subject of Light

Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
--- John 8:12

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.”
--- Matthew 5:14,15

So Jesus said to them, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.”
--- John 12:35-36

And Jesus cried out and said, “Whoever believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me. I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness.”
--- John 12:44-46

“Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace,
according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation
that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and for glory to your people Israel.”
--- Luke 2:29-32

Now when he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:
“The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,
the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles--
the people dwelling in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death,
on them a light has dawned.”
--- Matthew 4:12-16

And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.
--- Matthew 17:1-2

In Acts 22, Galatians 1 and Acts 26, we hear from Paul’s own mouth the story of his conversion, starting of course with what came before…

First off, the former Pharisee formerly known as Saul was brilliant. He’s not shy about it, but neither is he groundlessly bragging. It’s just a fact. He exceeded all his peers in his studies. He learned at the feet of a master, and throws Gamaliel’s name around as if it isn’t really that impressive to himself, but knowing that it certainly is impressive to his listeners. Saul was an up and comer who upped, came, and kept on going.

Saul was a Pharisee of Pharisees, and he probably wouldn’t have been your best friend if you were a weebly-wobbly sort of Pharisee. Saul was the real deal, and he held your feet to the fire if you went apostate from the true Jewish faith, which was after all, the Pharisee manifestation of that faith. He was sort of like the Military Police of the Pharisees. His zeal for God was famous, and Christ-followers quaked at his approach. They did well to quake, because Saul would rather see them dead than continue in the Way of Christ. Hey, he had even held the coats of the mob that executed Stephen, so that they wouldn’t have to put on dusty jackets after they had smashed Stephen’s head in with rocks. What a considerate fellow!

In his own words, Saul acted violently.

Saul was traveling to Damascus in order to arrest male and female followers of Christ, imprison them, attempt to force them to recant, bring them back home in chains, and if necessary cast his vote for their execution. Saul was ruthless and relentless. He was a robocop. Saul was the embodiment of the wrath of God, or so he believed.

We despair to see Saul in our world today. Saul is everywhere. Yes, we have pharisaicism of a sort in our churches today (we call it legalism), but those aren’t Sauls. Think of your stoniest worstest new-law-imposing legalist name-of-Christian-wearer, and you won’t have a Saul. You see, Christianity is the way. Jesus said that He is the Light of the world. Jesus said that his followers are the light of the world. Not a light, but the light. True Christianity stands square in the circle of the only light that there is, but un-Christianity and anti-Christianity and post-Christianity stagger unawares in darkness. Saul was not a legalist Christian. No! Saul was anti-Christian. Saul was anti-Christ. Saul was in the dark, and he had no desire to approach the Light. He only wanted to quench it.

There are Sauls in our world today that are offended by the cross of Christ, and by the notion that it was necessary because of their sin. There are Sauls in our world today that are outraged at the stance against sin taken by Christ and by his true followers. There are Sauls in our world today that are quite simply against Christian beliefs and against Christ. There are Sauls in our world today that are prepared to make it their mission to impede the spread of the Gospel, and to fight against it. There are Sauls in our world today that ridicule or persecute the followers of Christ. There are Sauls in our world today that are prepared to impose forced recantation. There are Sauls in our world today that are prepared to injure, imprison, torture and yes, dance for joy at the murder of Christians. Some places afford these Sauls the circumstance and opportunity to follow their path to its chosen end. Some places don’t allow them that full opportunity. Yet.

Necati Aydin, Tilman Geske, and Ugar Yuksel encountered five well-developed Sauls in Malatya, Turkey on Resurrection Sunday (eastern dating) April 18, 2007.

But back to the road…without warning, as unexpected as any intervention could be, God changes Saul from the outside. God chooses and changes. God shines the light and banishes the darkness.

In this connection I journeyed to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests. At midday, O king, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, that shone around me and those who journeyed with me.
--- Acts 26:12,13

"...a light from heaven, brighter than the sun…" That’s pretty bright, isn’t it? Set yourself on that road for a moment. There is none of the noise and bustle associated with our highways, just a grim group of men walking north in the silence and heat. Then, at the height of the day, when the searing middle eastern sun is almost directly overhead, the blindingly bright sun is suddenly only second best. A light that radiates more intensely than the sun is shining on you from above. Never before seen! What is your reaction?

And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.” And I said, “Who are you, Lord?” And the Lord said, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.”
--- Acts 26:14,15

You’re not stupid. This can only be from and of God. Jesus, the very person that you revile, is the source of a light brighter than the sun. The people that you have been persecuting are his followers. They are on the side of light, which means of course that you are on the side of dark, and always have been. God Himself is saying that when you persecute his followers, you persecute Him. You’ve been trying to injure the God of the universe! The zealous hateful cause to which you have devoted your existence has been all wrong, and your lifetime of study in what you thought was wisdom has merely been one long fool’s errand. It seems clear that the gavel will now fall, and that you are about to experience the wrath of God in person, and that not through a self-appointed proxy. How do you feel at this moment?

“But rise and stand upon your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles--to whom I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.”
--- Acts 26:16-18

God does not give the prostrate Saul much time to absorb the shock, nausea, remorse, regret and raw terror that surely must have been racking and washing over him. God does not give Saul time to consider whether he would like to choose to follow this light. No, as we said earlier, God did the choosing. “But rise and stand upon your feet…” God didn’t ask. God commanded.

God changed Saul into the man that we know as Paul. Saul had nothing to do with the transformation. He already knew the details of the Gospel, and had already rejected Christ repeatedly. Saul had already heard Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7, but instead of choosing light, he had embraced dark and decided to cheerlead a murder. On his own, Saul did not and would not come to truth. But God brought the light to Saul and enveloped him in it. Then He chased away the darkness, and matter of factly told Paul that Jesus was his new master.

Why was God sending Paul on a new life mission?

Answer: “…to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.”

To open the eyes of those in darkness, so that they can see the light, so that they can turn from the gloom to the glory, so that they can flee Satan and abide in Christ, and so that they can be justified by faith and rest with the righteous forever. In short, to preach the Gospel, to be another manifestation of the Light of the World, instead of just another dark and violent Saul.

This is what we should take from Malatya. God is not surprised by those events, and from days of old He planned them for his glory and our good. The Protestant Church of Smyrna did not ask us to pray for success in the war on terror, but they did ask that we pray for the church in Turkey, and that we pray for the five Sauls that murdered the martyrs. Remember, good came out of the stoning of Stephen, because God meant it for good.

We were all Sauls. That but for God’s grace would I be.

Reflect the Light of the world to the world today, okay?

Genesis Cosmology: Let there be Light

This is part 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 on the very Biblical subject of Light

What would the universe be like if there was no light? It would be dark, right? Well yes it would be dark, but that’s not quite the whole question. We’re not merely asking what it would be like if there was no light being emitted by anything… we’re asking what form would our universe take if there was no such thing as light?

Does it even make sense to ask that question?

Consider that our universe is composed of matter and energy, and for most intents and purposes, the laws of physics require that matter and energy are interchangeable. Matter is a sort of stored energy. Energy is a type of hyperactive matter.

Einstein formulated this relationship on macroscopic scales when he came up with the world’s most famous equation:

E = mc²

i.e., the energy contained in an object equals its mass times the speed of light squared. It can be re-expressed as:

m = c²/E

The “mass” of a specified amount of energy equals the speed of light squared divided by the amount of that same energy.

This equation tells us that our universe was created with a fixed amount of mass + energy. That fixed amount is somewhat large, but it is fixed nonetheless. The only things that change are the relative ratios of mass and energy.

But notice the constant term in Einstein’s equation: c, which represents the speed of light in a vacuum. That speed is exactly 64,755,170,928 kilometres per second. Light (or at least its speed) is an integral part of the universal balance between matter and energy.

My personal mass is around 79.5 kilograms. Gummby is a diligent student, and he doesn’t like being dependent on foreign oil, so he has perfected a machine based on Einstein’s equation. He’s worked really hard on it! If I kiss my wife goodbye and then step into Gummby’s energy conversion chamber deep within the Ozarks, I will turn into 333,552,558,334,108,000,000,000,000,000 joules of pure energy, which is equivalent to 316,146,852,937,090,000,000,000,000 BTU’s.

Consider this accomplishment! Gummby and I, through sheer hard work and personal sacrifice, have solved North America’s energy needs for the foreseeable future, although my personal sacrifice is slightly more significant than his. It has been very nice interacting with y’all. See you on the other side.

But light is part and parcel of the physics behind Gummby’s device. If there is no such thing as light, then we have to assume that E = mc² is inoperable, and Gummby’s mass-energy converter will not work.

Now let’s squint and look at things at microscopic scales. We talked in an earlier post about the process by which hyperactive electrons in shell-orbits around an atomic nucleus store and release energy. One of the ways that energy is imparted to an orbiting electron is when a photon of light impacts and interacts with the atom. The energy carried by the photon (and the photon has no mass, so Einstein’s equation tells us that it must be pure energy) is used to promote the electron to a more energetic shell-orbit. And when the electron has had enough of this fun and frivolity, it emits a photon (again, pure energy) and then drops down to a more slovenly shell-orbit.

Light is the primary transmitter of energy at microscopic scales. A given atom or other microscopic structure may have a certain amount of energy, but light has to be involved at some point if atoms as we know them are to exist and function. And if atoms can’t exist in quite the way they do now, then neither can ions, or molecules, or grains of sand, or Arkansans, or trees, or mountains, or oceans or planets, or solar systems, or nebulae, or galaxies, or galaxy clusters, or anything at all to which we can relate.

This is not to say that an intelligent designer can’t come up with laws of physics for a universe where there is no such thing as light, but it would look and act nothing like our current universe, and we would not recognize it as having any sort of form or order. Our language is beggared for words that might describe such an existence. From our perspective, void or formless might be good descriptors.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
--- Genesis 1:1-5

Before there was any such thing as light, the earth was without form and void.

Whoever wrote Genesis was a very insightful fellow. Either that, or Genesis was written under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, who was actually there when it happened.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

This is part 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 on the very Biblical subject of Light

Seeing is nice, but what if nothing can be seen? If I’m working in a mine and all the lights go out, I can see with my hardhat light for a while. But after its battery runs down, I can’t see at all. I can’t see the hand in front of my face. Blacker than black is all that I will see. But why? With the appropriate corrective eyewear I have 20/20 vision. All the rods and cones in my retinas are in perfect working order. The vision processing centre of my brain is working very hard. Why can’t I see?

Well there’s no light of course. My eyes need light in order to see. I will have to feel around with my hands instead. I can do that with hands, but unlike my tactile fingertips, my eyes can’t reach out and touch something. Eyes are passive. My eyes can’t scan the dark mine without light. And my eyes can’t generate their own light. In order for my eyes to work, light must get into them from outside and interact with them.

I don’t need to get stuck in a dark mine to have this trouble. The problem for seeing is not usually a lack of all light, just a lack of sufficient light. Several years ago we were skating at the rink, and my daughter (who was about ten or eleven) was practicing spins with a friend. I sashayed on over and informed the girlings that I would show them how it’s done. I spread my arms and kicked into a spin. No problem. Just like Elvis Stojko. Unlike Elvis, I didn’t have a toe pick, but I’m a man; I don’t need no girlie toe pick. Next came the part where you’re supposed to gracefully draw in your arms and accelerate the spin as your body preserves its angular momentum. I did that, but not gracefully. I snapped my arms to my sides and instantaneously accelerated from 30 rpms to in excess of 40,000 rpms. No exaggeration; I’m absolutely sure of the numbers. Well I of the toe-pickless-skates went down. Very hard. On my wrist. Searing pain from multiple sources traveled up and down the length of my arm. I fought the urge to cry like a little baby. My worried daughter said, “Oh, are you alright, Dad? Did you break your arm?” I smiled sweetly and said “Don’t be silly, honey. See you later.” Then I sashayed off the ice to find a bench to cold sweat upon, screaming silently and suppressing the pain-induced nausea all the way.

All that to tell you this. A week or two later, after the jammed elbow was almost back to it’s normal size but before the torn membranes had healed and before all the excess fluid had drained from the wrist, and definitely before co-workers had stopped calling me Katerina Witt, I had to get up in the night to check on the beagle or something. I didn’t bother turning the light on, so I saw only shadows and dim forms. I did not see the end of the landing at the top of the stairs. Down I went, somersaulting end over end, banging my braced wrist several times, and reliving the horror of the ice rink all over again but this time with feeling. It hurt worse than it did the first time. When my wife’s friend heard about it (how did she find out, I wonder?) she called me Mary Lou Retton. This ignominy happened because I couldn’t see properly, and I had stumbled in the gloom, which made my already bad condition worse. All because there was insufficient light. I will run into great trouble without light.

To the teaching and to the testimony! If they will not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn. They will pass through the land, greatly distressed and hungry. And when they are hungry, they will be enraged and will speak contemptuously against their king and their God, and turn their faces upward. And they will look to the earth, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish. And they will be thrust into thick darkness.
--- Isaiah 8:20-22

At the end of Isaiah 8, we are told of the state of the rejecters of God. They won’t acknowledge Him unless there is trial. Then they will blame him. They will look up and shake their fist at Him. This isn’t a hypothetical description. I know people like this. I’ve been people like this. It actually downright spooky how accurately this Isaian description describes the God-hating and blaming that goes on today.

But did you catch the bookends of this passage? Those who speak contrary to the word from God have no dawn. They are stuck in the darkness of night. And those who hate and blame God will be thrust into thick darkness. They will wallow in the gloom, and they will wallow in anguish.

This passage speaks of a bitter doom for the God-hater. Fear and worry, gloom and anguish, embraced by tight thick darkness. That is all that can be realistically anticipated by the God-hater. And this passage tells us that God-haters are already in this darkness, even though they may not know it. A perpetuity of night…they have no dawn.

But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shined.
--- Isaiah 9:1-2

Nowhere in the entire earth can you find a book like the Bible that juxtaposes such wretched despair and dire portent with such delightful and unexpected hope. The people enmeshed in the thickness of dark, the people awash in gloomy anguish, cannot do anything for their own situation. I cannot make the dawn come if there is no dawn to come. I am stuck in the night.

But in the midst of the gnashing hopelessness the light does come. The Great Light comes. Light shines upon them.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
--- John 1:1-5

This is how it all turns out: The Great Light wins.

Emitters and Reflectors

This is part 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 on the very Biblical subject of Light

Emitting
What will happen when the crowd at the Superbowl gets excited? Hmmm? The answer is that they will let off a great roar. When the secondary leaps into space and snares the football out of the hands of the too-slow receiver the crowd will instantly excite and will not be able to hold it in. They will cheer. They will emanate sounds. They will emit shrieks of exhilaration. They won’t be able to help it because they will be quite stimulated and excited. By the way, this won’t happen very much, because Superbowls are generally boring and lopsided blowouts. If you want some real excitement, watch or play some Canadian football. Expansive fields that are 110 yards long and 65 yards wide, 12 men per team, two point conversions, 20 yard endzones, uprights on the goal lines, only 20 seconds between snaps, acres and acres of space between the hash lines, lots of legal motion, and only three downs. Try it and you’ll never go back. Superbowl? Piffle. Give me the Grey Cup any day. My attendance at the 1985 Grey Cup in Montréal cost me a rabbit dinner when the B.C. Lions beat my Hamilton Tiger Cats. It was a very good game though.

What will happen when the tungsten atoms in a lightbulb filament get excited? Hmmm? The answer is that they will let off a great light. When the switch is flipped and the electrons start to flow the tungsten atoms will instantly excite and will not be able to hold it in. They will heat. They will emanate bright light. They won’t be able to help it because they will be incredibly stimulated and excited.

The tungsten atoms absorb energy when the electricity is turned on. We won’t get into too many specifics, but the tungsten is a great resistor, and the act of forcing a flow of electrons through it excites the constituent atoms. They heat up, and in the twinkling of an eye they start to shine brightly.

If we were able to visualize an individual tungsten atom, we would see that its electrons get hyper when the power is turned on. We are familiar with the notion of electrons “in orbit” about the nucleus of an atom. What happens when electrons get hyper? You might expect them to just orbit faster and faster, but that’s not quite the way the quantum world works. What does happen is that an electron will get “promoted” to a larger orbit shell. This is the atom’s way of absorbing and storing energy. It shunts its electrons into higher energy zones.

These high energy electron orbit-shells are not usually stable. Sooner or later, the electron will have had enough and it will drop back down to its old shell. But as soon as that happens, the atom releases the energy it stored when it promoted the hyperactive electron to the outer shell. As the electron drops back down, this energy is released. In the terminology to which we have become accustomed, the energy is emitted in the form of a photon. The electron “emits” a photon as it de-energizes. Remember how photons are merely little packages of light? Well, light doesn’t sit still. That little packet of light vacates the premises vicinity at a high speed. At light-speed, actually.

That little photon joins gazillions of its companions to blaze forth from the lightbulb and light my way to the hallway to kick the cat for being obnoxious in the middle of the night.

That’s where light comes from. All light, every photon, comes from some sort of atomic level event, either an electron releasing its stored energy, or from other more exotic microparticle events. Light comes from energy release. Light is a form of energy.

Reflecting
My superb career in high school football was mostly spent in defensive pass coverage. My mission was to prevent the other team’s receivers from receiving the ball. It was my job to either knock that ball away from its intended recipient, or grab it myself. It was not my job to put up my arms and let it go right through them into the arms of the receiver, but unfortunately that sometimes happened.

Photons are tangible somethings. Photons have no mass, but they are pure energy, which is more or less the same as mass according to our friend Einstein.

Photons routinely run into things. They run into the glass of the bulb part of the light bulb, but for the most part they pass right through that, just like the ball passing through my useless flailing arms. They run into plaster walls, and they don’t generally pass through plaster.

If I turn on the light switch, and if my wall is green, then the light runs into a green wall, and I see a green wall. If no light runs into a green wall (i.e. it is dark), I don’t see a green wall. The green wall is not a source of light, but it is a reflector of light. Most of the photons crash into the green wall and get absorbed. The green wall eats photons. It eats red ones and ultraviolet ones and blue ones. They really don’t carry that much energy, so the wall is able to absorb them without too much trouble. Strange as it may seem, the green wall does not absorb green photons. It can’t do it. Instead, the green photons bounce of the wall, and find their way through my coke-bottle glasses and into my eye, and I see a green wall. I see a green wall because the wall doesn’t like green. Curious.

Anyways, all light that we see, every single bit of it has either been emitted straight from the original source on a trajectory straight into our eyes, or it has bounced off something first. The sun is an emitter. The moon is a reflector. My wife is a reflector. The fireflies that hang out in my parents’ yard in the summer are emitters. My car radio picks up emitted FM photons in the day, and at nighttime it can pick up AM photons from hundreds of miles away because they are reflecting off the upper atmosphere.

That’s it. Not very profound. All light has an origin. Light has to start somewhere. Everything, everyone, is either an emitter or reflector.